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I'll contribute to making up that 473M loss if they could get their next gen cards out by the time I get my tax return!

Well assuming their 8xxx parts replace the 7xxx parts in the price structure instead of being added in above. I am not going to get price gouged like all those poor fools who bought a 7970 when it was first released.Reply

Probably looking at 9xxx parts if you're looking for an actual upgrade over 7xxx. AMD recently announced 8xxx would be "OEM-only" rebrands, but I suspect they will trickle down into the retail market as well and replace the current 7xxx line-up.

I doubt we will see Sea Islands in the next quarter or so, if Sea Island launch was imminent I think AMD could've convinced their OEM partners to hold off.

We will probably know more in a month or two as rumor has it Nvidia is gearing up to launch their Kepler refresh headlined by the long-awaited BigK (GK110). If AMD isn't ready to counter with actual product, I'm sure we'll start seeing leaked specs instead.Reply

AMD announced the OEM 8xxx parts, not the retail ones. There will be a non-OEM 8xxx series launch, the higher up models being based on GCN2. From what I've heard, and it could be wrong, the OEM parts were launched a couple of weeks back and the retail parts will arrive in Q2. The new codenames on the desktop are Oland (85xx and 86xx), Bonaire (87xx), Hainan (88xx) and Curaçao (89xx) if the following link is to be believed:

It's certainly possible AMD names the next-gen Sea Island parts 8xxx, but I highly doubt it. That would only cause significantly more confusion in the market to have completely different ASICs behind the same-named OEM and retail parts.

Maybe if the 8xxx was mobile-only would this possibly make sense to have different ASICs behind the same SKUs since this occurs now, but the 8xxx rebrand is top-to-bottom and both desktop and mobile on the OEM-side.

I think it's much more likely that we see a full re-brand on the OEM side for 8xxx, a partial re-brand on the retail side. Then with Sea Islands, a jump up to 9xxx on the retail side with the OEM side following shortly after.Reply

OEM in the past has just used retail SKUs in *addition* to some OEM-specific SKUs (ie. GTX 555, LE or SE parts). The exception has been in the mobile space where "M" parts are almost always a different SKU than the desktop counterpart for obvious TDP reasons.

But there has NEVER been a time where the OEM lineup top-to-bottom has used the same product numbers on a completely different ASIC as the desktop counterparts. I doubt that this will change with OEM using 8xxx series numbering with older Southern Islands parts and the desktop parts using the same 8xxx series numbering but Sea Islands chips. That's pretty much the only way AMD could make this situation more embarassing, anyways.Reply

I guess you could say they are stuttering financially and having trouble smoothing out their business model. They hope an update this year will turn things around, but many fear this will affect their performance. Reply

When AMD had the performance crown for long periods while Intel and Nvidia stumbled, they charged a premium for their products (Athlon 64 and 9800Pro to X1950XTX). So there was certainly a time AMD/ATI products commanded hefty price premiums.

The problem on the CPU side has been obvious. Ever since Core 2 launched, AMD has been running a performance deficit and could never compete in performance so they were forced to compete on price.

The problem on the GPU side has been less obvious, because AMD has been for the most part, very competitive in terms of performance. AMD's mistake, imo, was their pricing of the HD4850/4870, something I've been very critical of. The 4870 was very competitive with the much pricier GTX 260/280, and despite launching after the 280, AMD cut Nvidia's pricing by more than half.

AMD claimed they had to price it so low to regain market share after the failed HD 2900 and 3800 series, but they priced the 4870 so low that made AMD GPUs synonymous with value brand. Since then, they've never been able to recover from this price mistake, as subsequent generations have been good improvements but not enough to justify the type of premium to significantly shift the pricing structure set by the 4870. Making it even harder is the fact Nvidia has generally held the single-GPU crown in each generation since.

All you have to do is look at AMD's recent attempts to jump up their pricing with the 7970 to see what the 4870 did to their long-term outlook.Reply

We've all been hoping for recovery for 6 years now. Hasn't happened. Won't happen.

Phenom was a little behind, Bulldozer is lot behind. The trajectory is clear. Turning things around doesn't get easier when you're in all kinds of financial troube and have to split the company up five ways and sell for parts.I think AMD is only kept alive to figure out what to do with "ATI".

I mixed AMD and Intel between '95 and '99, went AMD exclusive between '99 and '06. Haven't even considered them for my own machines since then. Last time I used AMD in a build for someone else was in 2010.

Sad story this.

OTOH Intel has been pricing their stuff decently in the absence of competition. Their 200$ parts are worth the money, I think.Reply

Do those cash reserves not look less healthy when taken with the continued $2bn debt (was $1.5bn a year ago, unchanged since last quarter but obviously they have $300m less cash over that quarter) AMD are carrying?

I also hope for an AMD recovery as nVidia need competition to force their prices down and make sure they bring the fastest chips they can design to the market to compete and Intel could be pushed to offer better value for people who don't want to spend money on transistors for an iGPU they don't plan to use (but would certainly like a hexacore or a more aggressive product for peak performance in the traditional 100W+ TDP envelope without buying a server grade CPU at server prices).Reply

That's a good point, but the Wii U hasn't sold huge quantities yet, and the xbox 720 and ps4 don't exist yet - if those do turn out to sell like hotcakes, then I agree, that could be very good for AMD.Reply

They were already in 2 of the 3 seventh generation consoles. Unless Durango sells in huge numbers on day one, I don't think it will really help in terms of quarterly reports, just more long term steady revenue. Reply

It won't matter, the GPU licensing agreements AMD has for their console chip designs pays them peanuts, pennies per console sold. It's similar to ARM's licensing of their chips, the main difference is ARM sells a lot more chips but also has a lot less overhead and operating costs. But in the big picture, ARM is still a tiny company in terms of overall revenue, a couple dozen million in revenue per quarter is not even going to be a blip on AMD's financials and certainly not enough to pull them out of the red.

I suspect that's why Intel and Nvidia haven't cared too much about getting their ASICs into the next-gen consoles, there's simply no money in it. It's like giving away the tech for free, and in some cases, directly supporting indirect competitors.

I forget the exact numbers but last I checked it was pretty insignificant. Ryan or some other interested party might be able to pull them out of the financials but I believe in years past AMD made ~20M annually on their XBox 360 liensing fees. Double, even triple that and it's still not going to make much dent in that operating deficit.Reply

Yeah, I think it's clear that the ATI part is the one that will survive, the CPU division needs to go.

ATI must also love that AMD execs sold off Imageon, the company's handheld chip, to Qualcomm. They call it the Adreno.

AMD must be the worst managed company in IT. The engineering dept. clearly was industry competitive, but the suits always made the wrong decisions.Both ATI and AMD would probably be better off today if the companies had stayed seperated. All the time and money that was wasted on that merger...Reply

Yeah it's really amazing what happened with some of the mistakes AMD made, SnapDragon/Adreno one of many. It's no wonder many in AMD's graphics division are making a mass exodus to Qualcomm.

I agree the merger was a huge waste of time and money and while ATI may be the only division in AMD worth anything at this point, it's really the biggest reason for AMD's problems, a point that's typically overlooked.

AMD paid 6B for ATI when they merged, many at the time thought they overpaid, and that's clearly the case today as AMD's graphics division while outperforming the rest of the company is still clearly underperforming it's price expectations. 300-500M in revenue and <25M in profit per quarter simply does not justify a $6B acquisition price. The interest and hefty write-offs attached to the acquisition alone attest to this fact.

If and when AMD spins off ATI for peanuts (maybe even to Qualcomm, how ironic), it will be a drop in value of historical proportions.Reply

It won't make any difference if they follow the same licensing for the Xbox 360 GPU. AMD didn't manufacture the GPU's for MS, rather they sold the design and allowed MS to shop around for suppliers. Similarly MS got the same deal from IBM for the CPU. Hence MS was not burdened by a vendor who refused to shrink their designs to lower component prices like what happened with the original Xbox (*cough* Intel *cough* nVidia *cough*). This was a one time deal and not something AMD received continual revenue overtime. On that note, reading through MS recently quarterly report you can see some deferred items for the Home and Entertainment division. This my hint that MS hasn't yet paid AMD for next gen parts so it isn't entirely doom and gloom.

The only restriction I can see to his arrangement is if MS and/or Sony went with an x86 CPU. Due to the Intel/AMD cross license, there are some restrictions on who has access to x86 IP. While AMD has sold their fabs, they will likely have a say in where the console chip is manufactured. Being x86 also means that MS and/or Sony cannot purchase the design whole sale like MS did with the Xbox 360's GPU. Though I'm under the impression and contrary to recent rumors that AMD is sticking with PowerPC due to the desire for backwards compatibility.Reply

The successor to their highly successful Brazos/Bobcat series is certainly a product that's something to get excited about. Unfortunately for AMD and Intel both, regardless of what products they put out they'll be inextricably tied to MS and the Win8 failtrain. Intel at least has the high margin server segment to help keep it afloat, but AMD is actually hovering below ARM's current server market share at sub-5%.

So even if Kabini and Haswell exceed most people's expectations, chances are they're just not going to sell like they need to unless MS gets their ship in order first. Reply

Well I've bought three AMD APUs (all Trinity) in the last 3 months for various lower power office / HTPC computers that I built. I'm also looking at an upgrade for my own desktop but not sure I want to go the APU route or not. The only problem is that AM3+ mATX motherboard selection is AWFUL. The good AMD mATX boards are all FM2/FM1.Reply

The only good thing this year for AMD are the consoles, Jaguar is low ASP and somewhat collides with tablets so if there are any Win 8 tablets that sell well and they get to into those,it could be good for them. For Jaguar based SoCs i hope they'll do a better job at launching it than with Brazos 2, Brazos 2 was so low key that it went under the radar.Kaveri .. is it for this year? AMD doesn't have resources and money to waste,doing both Rrchland and Kavery in a year seems a bit much and late in the year might be too late to go 28nm, I guess we'll see.but it would be nice to see them go 20nm early.I do hope their revenue stops declining ,we need them in desktop at least with Intel bailing out.Reply

Sorry, of course I meant to write Trinity. No there is no indication that it will include GCN. Second generation DX11 is what Trinity (VLIW4) already has. All AMD documents says only this. New chipset and some new software is what Richland is. See it as a platform, the silicon is just a minor revision.Reply

AMD didn't have all that bad of year at all considering the current worldwide economic meltdown that shows no signs of ending for another five years. With AMD buying Seamicro, buying out their GloFo exclusive contract and Q4 wafer commitment, AMD is actually doing pretty good especially with all of the new products they have coming to market in '13 and '14. They have good OEM wins for SoCs and will be in the next X-Box and Play Station. With Trinity racking up sales in both laptop and desktop and FX doing just fine in desktop, AMD is headed in the right direction. Their server group has been relaunched and should be generating significant revenues in micro servers - especially now that they own Seamicro. AMD's obituary is widely mis-reported.Reply

I would like to note that Piledriver was actually a huge success performance-wise... No one seems to have noticed (thanks Toms for finally pointing it out) that Piledriver isn't the bottleneck for all games but Skyrim the CPU slaughterhouse (and maybe SC2; it wasn't benched). Given that games are among the few tasks that can't be extended to 8 threads easily, reviewers should be recommending Piledriver more. So really, this is the press' fault. The media is neglecting AMD's development wins.

Intel gets reviews of nearly 1/3rd their SKUs, but I haven't seen one yet for the 6300, the A8 mobile, or many other SKUs. Why? I can tell you my A8 Trinity laptop is competitive price/performance.

OEMs are biased, the media is reliant on samples, and AMD's image will screw it over. The only thing AMD is terrible for is Linux, and that's a niche that shouldn't be killing them.

By all rights, this should've been a great year for AMD. So maybe AMD is doomed. What will it take to make it out of Intel's shadow again?Reply

Um, I just wanted to point out that AMD is NOT terrible for Linux. It's quite good in fact. AMD CPUs work very well- better in fact than on Windows, as on Windows a lot of stuff is compiled with Intel Compiler, which disables a lot of optimizations on AMD chips. That's the reason 99% of Windows benchmarks are skewed towards Intel. I even stopped looking at Windows benchmarks in many review sites, as even some benchmark software is compiled with Intel compiler...

As for GPUs, of course, Intel has 100% open-source drivers. AMD has community written open-source Galium3D drivers as well, which are becoming better and better very rapidly. And they have binary drivers that work OK as well. Unfortunatelly open-source graphics drivers don't have video acceleration nor OpenCL, but the binary drivers have support for both under Linux.

I've been using Linux with AMD CPUs and GPUs for years, and I'm quite happy. Of course, I mostly do software development and related stuff, so I don't need heavy 3D graphics.Reply